1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology for acquiring, processing and storing various data stored in a database using, what is called, spreadsheet software.
2. Prior Art of the Invention
There has been a database service for collecting and accumulating a large volume of data in a specific area such as economic statistics data, and for providing users with such data through Internet etc. This database service includes providing what is called time-series data (which hereinafter means a numerical data group observed or produced over the course of time or attribute information of the numerical data group: that is, for example, data such as changes in the sales of a product or changes in a specific stock price with time). The data obtained by the users of the database are processed and computed if necessary and utilized as graphs or tables.
In a conventional technique, there is also a technology for obtaining data from the database service by using a computer terminal and for displaying these data on a display screen as graphs or tables by writing out the data acquired on a software for database access (for example unexamined Japanese patent publication JP2001-265311A).
Data, especially time-series data provided from the database service generally have a large volume of data, and it is often the case that data to be displayed can not be given until a predetermined computation is carried out for all original data obtained from the database (as is the case for displaying a seasonally-adjusted value).
The above-mentioned patent realizes a short response time because computation for all original data can be completed by one computation process irrespective of the number of data. There is, however, a drawback or inconvenience in this technology. That is, variation or display mode is limited so that the users could not be fully satisfied with the technology who want to get a wide variety of display patterns.
To solve these drawbacks, there is another method for obtaining data through direct access to the database from a cell of spreadsheet software (hereinafter referred to “spreadsheet soft”) and then displaying them on the display screen.
However, according to this method, computation is carried out individually for each data in each cell of the spreadsheet soft. Accordingly, in the case of the above-mentioned time-series data, if this method is applied for a case in which computation must be performed for all data at the time of producing each value to be displayed, time-consuming or hefty computation is needed, resulting in increasing in response time and being inconvenient.